Berlin 2018 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 20: Reduction and Emergence in Econophysics (joint session AGPhil/SOE)

SOE 20.1: Hauptvortrag

Donnerstag, 15. März 2018, 15:00–15:45, H 2033

Reduction, emergence and mechanisms in magnets and markets — •Meinard Kuhlmann — University of Mainz

Treatments of critical phenomena in physics but even more so in interdisciplinary applications exhibit a certain tension when we ask whether a micro reduction is possible: On the one hand, hardly anyone will doubt that these phenomena rest on (or ``supervene" upon) the behaviour of the constituents parts. On the other hand, the universality of critical phenomena suggests that the dynamics is in some sense independent from its physical manifestation on the micro level. That is, critical phenomena seem to be ``emergent" and thus defy reduction. I will argue that one can dissolve this tension by introducing the notion of ``structural mechanisms". Explanations in terms of structural mechanisms are reductive in the sense that it is the interactive organisation of the micro constituents that matters. However, only certain structural features of the interaction are important whereas the nature of the micro constituents is otherwise irrelevant.